New Year

Currently, I’m taking a break from clearing my email backlog. I’ve got a work backlog too! Last term was quite busy. And that’s an understatement. To give you some idea, in the week before the week containing Christmas (if you follow me), I was co-organizing a Postgraduate Conference from Monday to Wednesday, though on Wednesday I went to Bradford for a rather depressing meeting about STEM, in the evening I talked about card cheating and mathematics to the York Cafe Scientifique, on Thursday I flew to Valencia for a PhD viva on Friday, and returned to snowy Leeds on the Saturday.

Better get back to work!

Videos and REF

Still haven’t finished the videos for HTTLAM. I have laryngitis so can’t do the voiceover.

Anyhow, leaving that aside, David Mitchell (curmudgeon from Peep Show) wrote an excellent attack on the the Government’s replacement for the RAE, the REF. See it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/27/david-mitchell-pointless-studies-survey.

He makes a number of good points, I particularly liked

Research which will obviously make money if it comes off will always find private funding and so should not be prioritised for public money. In fact, it’s the very place that public money should never go – it’d be like spending the Arts Council budget on profit-making pantos instead of opera or pouring the licence fee into Quiz Call rather than BBC Four. 

Updates

The videos for HTTLAM were held up a couple of weeks ago. I was ready to start recording but the restaurant near my house had a refrigerator malfunction and so they had a refrigeration unit in their car park. The unit created sufficient noise to be detected on the sound track and so recording had to be abandoned. I hope to shoot next Monday – today my voice is too sore!

Also, corrections have appeared for the book. Only one really bad mistake so far but quite a few little annoying ones!

Solutions to HTTLAM

I’ve started producing solutions for How to Think Like a Mathematician, see my HTTLAM web page. This will be a large task and so I’ve started with the chapters that people have requested so far, i.e., the one on sets and the two chapters on induction.

No more books?

I had my annual professional review recently. This is where staff in the University have a meeting with a senior colleague to discuss what they have done and where they are going. Naturally, given the success of HTTLAM I put on my review form that I would like to write another book. Perhaps not surprisingly this was the main thing my reviewer wanted deleted from my plans. The idea is that I should be getting on with my research rather than wasting time producing books. So the suggestion of a new book was crossed off the review form. 

Maybe I should quote G.H. Hardy at this point

Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. [...] It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. – A Mathematician’s Apology

I guess that there will be no new books for a while…

Updates

Have been away at conference in Aarhus and on holiday in Crete and have been working very hard so haven’t kept the blog up-to-date.

How to Think Like a Mathematician

 The book seems to be selling well, it regularly makes the Amazon chart of 100 best-selling mathematics books. I’ve also added a list of corrections to my webpage on the book. 

Videos

I am nearly finished the videos. I’m giving everything a thorough rewrite before shooting starts next week.

Ledermann Obituaries

The mathematician Walter Ledermann has dies. There has been a Times obituary and a better one in the Independent.

Ledermann was very influential in my undergraduate learning. I used his book on Group Theory to learn the subject and the series of books he edited, and in some cases wrote, called the Library of Mathematics was great. Each book was a pocket-sized summary of some subject such as mathematical analysis, multiple integrals or complex analysis. The books left out a lot of the clutter and so it was possible to see what was really important in the area.

Needless to say he was influential in my writing of How to Think Like a Mathematician.

After reading How to Think Like a Mathematician

The website Bookseer allows you to enter the name and author of a book to give you a recommendation for a related book to read. Of course I entered HTTLAM and got quite a good list. 

The website just uses Amazon and LibraryThing to generate its suggestions. Unfortunately, LibraryThing gives “Nada” as a suggestion for HTTLAM.

Making science fun

A link to an interesting article on making science fun: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/16/science-lessons-inspiration

Strange Maps

As part of my research into map projections I came across a blog on strange maps: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

I particularly liked Pogue States (to do with songs by the Pogues) and the World War II: If maps could fight (a history of WWII).